The Guardian Article pretty much confirms my feeling about the copyright extension business. It's all about greed.

Cliff and co. don't need the extension for financial reasons. Even though Cliff Richard has little income from composition royalties, he has earned enough and I am pretty sure has it all carefully invested so he will not be going short. To my mind it's all about greed with little consideration given to the small guys.

I was in the Patent Office for a short time and one provision of the Patent Act, at least as it was at the time, was for "licence as of right". Essentially if a patent holder did not exploit his/her invention and a third party wished to, they could apply for a licence as of right to enable them to develop and exploit the invention. If you did this, you still had to pay royalties but the purpose of the provision was to prevent (usually big) organisations using patents to block the development of new technologies so as to protect their own existing products.

The clause in the new eu act seems to be an attempt to do something similar for copyright but it does not go far enough in my view. Copyright legislation needs to contain a provision similar to the patent "licence of right" applicable at any time during the copyright period to prevent the kind of situation that is being described in this thread. It's not only recording that is affected.